Feminism and the Future of Philosophy

By Gary Gutting

Sept. 18, 2017

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“There is a deep well of rage inside of me. Rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philosophy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the conditions that I’m sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave.” Those words, written a decade ago by Sally Haslanger, a distinguished professor of philosophy at M.I.T., well express the moral energy behind the feminist ferment currently shaking American philosophy.

This ferment has overturned the male dominance of our primary professional organization, the American Philosophical Association, with women (who make up about one-fourth of the members) holding over half of the seats on its governing board. This change correlates with the recent vigorous efforts of the A.P.A. to increase the proportion of women (and minorities) in philosophy and to root out all forms of bias and discrimination. The organization’s website lists a dozen projects and resources devoted to diversity, and its Committee on the Status of Women has established a site-visit program open to any department that wants advice on improving its climate for women.

This organizational shift, combined with supportive actions from many major philosophy departments, has decisively furthered philosophical feminism as a political cause. The discipline now seems committed in principle to gender equality, despite considerable disagreement about just what that means and how best to achieve it. We can still expect many intense and even rancorous disputes over these questions. Here, however, I want to put aside these unavoidable disputes and reflect on the importance of feminist philosophy for the future of philosophical thinking.

It’s easy to conclude that feminist philosophy is little more than the vehicle of a political movement. The editors of the recent “Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy” note that feminist philosophy “originated in feminist politics” and “included from the start discussion of feminist political issues and positions.”

Nowadays, major feminist philosophers often define their work in explicitly political terms. Elizabeth Anderson, for example, says that feminist epistemology and philosophy of science “identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups.” And Sally Haslanger, in her seminal analysis of gender and race, says, “At the most general level, the task is to develop accounts of gender and race that will be effective tools in the fight against injustice.” She goes on to offer the following definition of “woman”: “S is a woman [if and only if] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension — economic, political, legal, social — and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.”

Philosophers uneasy with strong feminist claims about the current poor treatment of women — or who just think it’s wrong to presuppose such claims in philosophical discussions — may feel that feminist philosophy has nothing to offer them. Even sympathetic male philosophers may see such philosophy as the province of women, particularly since most writing on feminist topics is by women and feminists sometimes seem not to welcome male contributions. (The 56 essays in the “Routledge Companion” are all by women.)

In fact, however, feminist philosophy should be an essential resource for all philosophers, whatever their views about its political agenda. To see why, it will help to reflect on an earlier disruption to the philosophical establishment: the “pluralist revolt” against the dominant analytic philosophy of the 1970s and ’80s. The pluralists were a disparate group of philosophers: pragmatists in the tradition of Peirce, James and Dewey; metaphysicians following classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas or the process philosophy of Whitehead; and, most prominently, “continental philosophers” working out of recent European movements such as phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre); post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida); and critical theory (Habermas and the Frankfurt School).

Pluralists challenged the dominance of the A.P.A. by the analytic philosophy that they saw as modeling itself on mathematics and natural science. This mode of thought, they said, imposed standards of conceptual clarity and logical rigor that restricted philosophical thinking to a narrow range of abstract and artificial questions. These restrictions, they argued, marginalized pluralist philosophers and, more important, excluded the great perennial questions that had defined philosophy from Plato to Hegel.

The pluralists gained a good deal of power within the A.P.A., made room for alternative voices and no doubt played a role in the broadening of analytic interests. Their efforts supported an increased interest in traditional questions, particularly in metaphysics and ethics, and a turn to pragmatic positions in epistemology. But the pluralists did not overcome the analytic hegemony, with analytic philosophers remaining a large majority in the most highly regarded departments.

Further, the pluralists did little to blunt the sharp division between analytic philosophy and so-called continental philosophy, which maintained its own (relatively marginalized) departments, national organization and journals. Indeed, we are now seeing a good deal of work on “continental” philosophers move from philosophy to other humanistic disciplines (for example, in language, communication and film studies departments) and to the softer social sciences.

Today, feminist philosophy has produced an awakening far beyond that of the pluralist revolt. It has already further broadened and deepened analytic philosophy and shows promise of promoting serious engagement with continental thinkers.

It’s interesting that the new feminist directions sometimes derive from the stereotypical roles that society has imposed on women. In ethics, as Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams note in their Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on feminist ethics, “proponents of feminist care ethics … stress that traditional moral theories … are deficient to the degree they lack, ignore, trivialize, or demean values and virtues culturally associated with women.”

So, for example, societies have often directed women toward subordinating their interests to others (husbands or children, for example). As a result, women tend to be particularly sensitive to “care” as an ethical value, and feminist philosophers (like Nel Nodding and Virginia Held) have developed various “ethics of care” that supplement or displace “masculine” ethical values such as autonomy and self-fulfillment. Even an other-directed principle such as “Act for the greatest happiness of all” takes on a deeper meaning when understood not as a duty toward generic humanity but as a call to personal engagement with those in need.

In a different vein, women live in a society that presents as “natural” what they experience as arbitrary constraints. This can provide them with a particular sensitivity to injustices that are due less to individual ill will than to the structures of established practices and institutions. Feminist social philosophers like Nancy Fraser have developed this line of thought in dialogue with the work of Marx, Foucault, Habermas and other continental thinkers.

Feminist epistemologists have developed the notion of situated knowledge to counter standard analytic approaches that treat knowledge as the goal of an isolated mind (à la Descartes), abstracted from concrete life situations such as the knower’s body, emotions, values and social roles. Continental traditions like Marxism and existential phenomenology have long emphasized such situated knowledge. But feminist philosophers like Louise Antony and Helen Longino have offered strong analytic arguments for enriching the “masculinist” view of knowledge with elements previously ignored, perhaps as signs of “feminine” cognitive weakness.

Similarly, feminist metaphysicians have argued that metaphysical distinctions between superior and inferior categories (mind/matter, essential/contingent, self/other) were often used to express male superiority. This has led to the suggestion that such dichotomies did not express eternal necessities but rather historically constructed social categories — a suggestion feminists found supported by the work of continental philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault.

Feminists’ personal and political rage against injustice (and parallel emotional reactions against their claims) could, of course, create an atmosphere inimical to fruitful philosophical reflection. But looking at the significant achievements of feminist philosophers, feminism promises to improve not only the climate for women but also philosophical thinking itself.